Vague Visages’  Booger review contains minor spoilers. Mary Dauterman’s 2023 movie features Grace Glowicki, Garrick Bernard and Heather Matarazzo. Check out the VV home page for more film reviews.

Booger is ostensibly a body horror movie, but despite the wacky premise, it’s actually a nuanced meditation on grief in all its ugliest, messiest and most nonsensical forms. The protagonist might be transforming into some kind of disgusting werecat, but beneath the hair-sprouting wound and gorging on tins of cat food, she’s really just trying to parse what a life without her best friend and constant karaoke companion looks like. An utterly committed Grace Glowicki is Anna who, at the outset of Booger, has just lost her other half, Izzy (Sofia Dobrushin), one fateful night, in undisclosed but clearly tragic circumstances. Writer-director Mary Dauterman — making her feature debut following a string of impressive, attention-grabbing shorts — teases out the details, but as with the greatest slice of life, New York-set stories, the journey is more important than the destination. 

The Booger of the title is a stray cat who wanders into Anna and Izzy’s lives and makes himself at home, as cats are wont to do. Although adorable, like most kitties, Booger is secretly evil and viciously attacks Anna before making a run for it. She then dedicates her entire life to finding the little monster, even though his bite has some shocking side effects. Also, Anna clearly isn’t Booger’s biggest fan, putting “will eat anything” on his missing posters before changing it to “loves cottage cheese” at the urging of a spacy local pet shop owner (Heather Matarazzo as Ellen), who only needs a few seconds of screen time to make an impression (her take on Booger is that he “looks like a spirit cat,” whatever the hell that means). It gradually becomes clear that poor Anna is desperately clinging to Booger as her only remaining connection to Izzy, much to the young woman’s detriment.

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Anna loses her job, home and almost her boyfriend (a quietly charming Garrick Bernard as Max) in quick succession,  all the while succumbing to a bizarre infection that results in hallucinations of black, cat-hair-coated vistas and cravings for cat food. Glowicki’s performance is incredibly physical, right down to how she holds her hands while crawling, cat-like, across the floor. She doesn’t overplay the feline mannerisms, however, instead relying mostly on twitching her mouth and darting her eyes, suggesting that Anna could just be suffering from a condition like Tourette’s, for instance. The visuals are equally strong whether she’s wandering aimlessly around the neighborhood trying to find her cat or eating leftover noodles in another desperate attempt to feel closer to Izzy — a scene that’s cleverly juxtaposed against another of Anna later devouring cat food. Women aren’t usually allowed to be this openly gross on camera; in the same year as The Substance, this is a massive win. 

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And yet, there’s a sense that Booger could have gone further. The wound on Anna’s hand is truly revolting, with hair sprouting out of it in a nod to The Fly (1986), and the makeup is effective, but Dauterman holds back from making it completely horrifying, which robs the central metaphor of some of its impact. Still, a shot of a woman using a massive litter box does offer Booger some additional street cred. Maybe it was an issue of budget or there were concerns about making Anna too much of a cat, which is understandable, but it feels as though something is being held back to the film’s detriment. It’s a shame because the emotional components are delicately handled, the flashbacks to Anna and Izzy’s previous, happy life together never overused. So much of what viewers learn about them comes from Anna herself, and Glowicki is just as intriguing when falling apart at the seams (because she’s lost her best friend) as she is freaking out over becoming a cat or acting out against her loved ones.

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Izzy is more thinly sketched in Booger, with most of what viewers glean about her coming from the other characters, but this could simply be Dauterman’s way of capturing how tough it is to keep the memory of someone alive once they’re gone forever. Anna’s boyfriend, meanwhile, is refreshingly supportive and kind, consistently trying to lift her spirits and never giving up on her the way men like this typically rush to do in movies. Unfortunately, Rupert Holmes’ “Escape,” aka “The Piña Colada Song,” will definitely get stuck in viewers’ heads as a result of watching Booger, since it forms a strangely sweet throughline, including the punk rock cover that plays over the closing credits. Much like everything else in Dauterman’s auspicious feature debut, the choice is oddly moving, and it fits the material just as beautifully as the perfectly hipster costuming and set dressing, along with Kenny Suleimanagich’s sunny cinematography, which makes this endearingly grubby corner of NYC seem like the coolest place to live, even when Anna’s stuff is tossed out on the street alongside piles of literal trash. Thus, even despite minor quibbles with the body horror aspects of the story, Booger is a surprisingly poignant and sensitive meditation on grief that utilizes a truly wild metaphor.

Booger released digitally on September 13, 2024 via Dark Sky Films.

Joey Keogh (@JoeyLDG) is a writer from Dublin, Ireland with an unhealthy appetite for horror movies and Judge Judy. In stark contrast with every other Irish person ever, she’s straight edge. Hello to Jason Isaacs.

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